Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States and the dominant diplomatic figure at the Paris Peace Conference, becomes a distant but consequential adversary in the book’s account of Italy’s postwar crisis. His refusal to award Italy either Dalmatia or Fiume deepens the sense of a victory denied, while his opposition to Gabriele D’Annunzio’s venture in Fiume places American plans for international order against Italian nationalist demands.

The Peace Settlement and Italian Grievance

The account links Wilson’s decisions to the expectations created by the Treaty of London. Signed in 1915, that agreement had promised Italy Dalmatia if it entered the war alongside Russia, France, and Great Britain. Italian nationalists added Fiume to the claim, arguing that the principle of self-determination promoted by Wilson should apply to a border city with a large Italian majority, even though Fiume had not been included in the treaty. Their formula joined the treaty’s promise to a new claim: Dalmatia and Fiume.

Wilson appeared unwilling to concede either territory. The book presents him as the central authority in the diplomatic contest and portrays his refusal as more than a disagreement over borders: in Italy, the manner of the refusal helped make the country feel disregarded by its former allies. The conflict thus turned on both what Italy was denied and who seemed entitled to explain the denial.

Addressing Italy Directly

On April 23, Wilson bypassed Italy’s representatives and addressed the Italian people through a long letter published in a French newspaper. He explained why he would grant neither Dalmatia nor Fiume. The account allows that his reasons may have been sound, but stresses that Italian readers experienced the intervention as humiliating. Its paternal tone made the United States seem not simply a negotiating power but a superior instructing a lesser ally.

The next day, Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and foreign minister Sidney Sonnino walked out of the Paris Peace Conference. Their departure gave public form to the dispute, and the perceived slight helped transform disappointment into a broader national feeling of deprivation. In the last week of April, demonstrations across Italy demanded Fiume and Dalmatia. Wilson’s appeal, intended as an explanation, therefore became part of a political crisis in which the Italian public rallied around its leaders and interpreted the settlement through the language of betrayal and humiliation.

Opposition to D’Annunzio’s Fiume

The book also sets Wilson against D’Annunzio, who had seized Fiume and turned it into a challenge to the postwar order. Wilson regarded the venture as the caprice of an aging man that threatened the League of Nations, the international institution he hoped would secure lasting justice and peace. The opposition was therefore presented as a clash between Wilson’s project of diplomatic and legal order and D’Annunzio’s defiant, theatrical occupation.

Their difference is sharpened through contrasting portraits. Wilson appears as an academic, puritanical, and austere advocate of moral order; D’Annunzio is represented as a public figure whose provocations and licentious literary reputation offended that sensibility. The account reports, rather than establishes as fact, stories about Wilson’s horror at D’Annunzio’s work and his contempt for the enthusiasm the poet inspired among Italians. This portrayal makes Wilson’s resistance personal in tone as well as political, while keeping the central stakes on the threat he believed Fiume posed to the League of Nations.

A Distant Power in a Domestic Crisis

Wilson does not appear as an actor on the ground in Fiume, but his decisions and judgments shape the pressures surrounding it. Italy’s leaders faced a popular demand for territories Wilson would not concede; D’Annunzio’s occupation challenged the international settlement; and the League of Nations stood, in Wilson’s vision, as the institutional alternative to such unilateral defiance. Against that framework, the book casts Wilson as both a powerful architect of postwar diplomacy and a figure whose handling of Italy intensified the grievance that nationalist politics could exploit.